Best of 2010: Albums

Whenever I hear some (presumably older) person say that there is no good new music I usually make a mental note never to trust that person's opinion about music ever again. This year was another terrific year for music that got off to a remarkable start but kind of stumbled across the finish line. Without further ado here is my list for the best albums released in 2010.


The runners-up on my list (in alphabetical order) are:


Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
Deftones - Diamond Eyes
The Drums - The Drums
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Los Campesinos! - Romance is Boring
Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More
Ra Ra Riot - The Orchard
Sleigh Bells - Treats
Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz
Two Door Cinema Club - Tourist History

10) Broken Bells - Broken Bells
Release date: March 9, 2010

The release of the debut (and possibly the only) album from Broken Bells was met with great anticipation. Fans of James Mercer from his work as frontman for The Shins and Danger Mouse eagerly awaited the release from this seemingly unlikely duo. The results of their collaboration are the songs contained on one of the year's most euphonious releases.

9) letlive. - Fake History
Release date: February 23, 2010

I guess it's somewhat ironic that the post-hardcore genre has quickly deteriorated but bands like letlive. are helping to carry the torch for the next generation of angry musicians with a penchant for writing catchy hooks. Fake History has plenty of agressive riffs and jumps into pop melodies without ever seeming forced. You probably won't find Fake History at Best Buy but it is worth the $9.99 I paid for the album on iTunes just for the song 'Muther'.

8) Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
Release date: August 2, 2010

In a year in which pop music seemingly dominated the Billboard charts and radio airwaves, it was nice to see that it is still possible to release a terrific album that garners both critical and commercial success. Arcade Fire had no flashy gimmicks or multi-million dollar promotional campaign, just the sixteen breathtaking songs that make up The Suburbs. The album debuted at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 and has now received three well-deserved grammy nominations including Album of the Year.

7) Minus the Bear - OMNI
Release date: May 4, 2010

Minus the Bear has been my favorite band for several years now and what appreciate is that they continue to evolve without fundamentally changing their sound. On OMNI, the band's first release with Dangerbird Records, they have gone to a more electronic sound than on previous albums. The opening track 'My Time' sets the tone with a synth-heavy chorus and dance beat throughout. All of the ten tracks on the album are significant in substance and length as the record clocks in at nearly 50 minutes but seems to be over far too quickly after each listen.

6) Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
Release date: May 4, 2010

It was a long five years between albums from Broken Social Scene's self-titled released until Forgiveness Rock Record. But when you consider the members and their numerous side projects (Feist, Metric, Stars and solo projects by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning) it is understandable that it would take some time to assemble the band and write a new record. That being said, the latest release from Broken Social Scene was well worth the wait and their most accessible album to date.

5) Menomena - Mines
Release date: July 27, 2010

I understand that a record company wants to set a release date for an album to create buzz and book a tour for the band to go out and support the album but Menomena experienced the downside of having a release date set months after the album has been completed. Due to be released in mid-August, their album Mines was leaked on the internet in May. The band was able to move up the release date but the damage had been done. It was a shame because Mines is one of the most unique and enjoyable albums in recent memory.

4) Kid Cudi - Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager
Release date: November 9, 2010

This year was a solid year for commercial hip-hop albums with Eminem, Kanye West, B.o.B. and The Roots all putting out successful and satisfying albums. Released just one week before Kanye West's very good but overhyped recent release and Man on the Moon II was this year's real hip-hop masterpiece. Some critics accused the album of being inconsistent but in my opinion Kid Cudi changes the sound and the tone on all seventeen tracks of this album without ever striking a wrong note. 'MANIAC' was one of my favorite tracks of the year but his somber ballad 'All Along' is equally impressive and profound.

 

3) The National - High Violet
Release date: May 10, 2010

The National were tasked with the duty of following up their 2007 release Boxer that was named by several critics as one of the best albums of the last decade. High Violet is louder and busier than the aforementioned Boxer but by no means does that make it inferior. The distinctive baritone vocals of lead singer Matt Berninger are what gives The National their unique sound in a crowded genre but that's not to discount the remarkable songwriting ability and the musicianship of the other members who make High Violet on the the year's best albums.

 

2) The Radio Dept. - Clinging to a Scheme
Release date: April 21, 2010

While attending the record release show for Broken Social Scene's Forgiveness Rock Record, the frontman Kevin Drew encouraged fans to buy some music from Amoeba to support the store regardless of what album they purchased. He mentioned several recent releases including Clinging to a Scheme from The Radio Dept. I purchased the album just a few days later and cannot thank him enough for the recommendation. Clinging to a Scheme has a way of doing what good music should do; it brings out your feelings and amplifies them- for better or worse.

1) Spoon - Transference
Release date: January 15, 2010

I've been making these lists for several years now and there has never been an album that was released in the first two months of the year that stayed at the top of my list for the entire year. This year is different and I'm in the minority of people who consider Transference to be the best album of the year and the strongest album that Spoon has released to date. The very opening of the first track 'Before Destruction' starts with a simple drum beat then acoustic guitar and vocals that sound as if they are being sung into a microphone in a different room. The record has good production value but it is stripped down. What I enjoy most about Transference is that the entire album has a timeless quality; it could have been recorded at any time in the last 40 years. When listening to Transference you should like listening because it continues to get better as the album go along and as another sign of a great album, my favorite track has changed several times throughout my countless listens.



Honorable mention goes to:


Beach House - Teen Dream
B.o.B. - B.o.B. Presents the Adventures of Bobby Ray
Delorean - Subiza
Girl Talk - All Day
Local Natives - Gorilla Manor



Best albums released in 2009 that I did not discover until 2010:

Bad Veins - Bad Veins
The Big Pink - A Brief History of Love
Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros - Up From Below
Hockey - Mind Chaos
Jack Peñate - Everything is New
Matt & Kim - Grand
Miike Snow - Miike Snow
The XX - The XX

Best of 2010: Songs

In a different turn from my usual end of the year lists, I decided to make a list of the best songs from 2010 because many of my favorite songs were not on albums that made my 'Best of' list.


Here are the 30 best songs that were released in 2010:

30) Wavves - King of the Beach
29) Open Hand - Herrons (feat. Matt Talbot)
28) Shout Out Louds - Fall Hard
27) The Roots - Doin' It Again
26) S. Carey - In the Dirt
25) Arcade Fire - Month of May
24) Spoon - Got Nuffin'
23) Sleigh Bells - Rill Rill
22) Local Natives - Wide Eyes
21) Two Door Cinema Club - I Can Talk
20) Maximum Ballon - Communion (feat. Karen O)
19) LCD Soundsystem - Dance Yrself Clean
18) Massive Attack - Paradise Circus
17) Mumford & Sons - Little Lion Man
16) The Whigs - Kill Me Carolyne
15) The Hold Steady - The Weekenders
14) Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - Revenge (feat. The Flaming Lips)
13) Vampire Weekend - Giving Up The Gun
12) Broken Social Scene - World Sick
11) Lower Dens - I Get Nervous
10) Minus The Bear - Hold Me Down
9) Menomena - Dirty Cartoons
8) Delorean - Stay Close
7) Athlete - Superhuman Touch
6) Foals - Spanish Sahara
5) The National - Afraid of Everyone
4) letlive. - Muther
3) Kid Cudi - MANIAC
2) Los Campesinos! - The Sea Is A Good Place To Think of The Future
1) Yeasayer - Ambling Alp

Dad

It’s hard to imagine a 13-year-old boy sitting on the sand at Huntington Beach, California feeling stress about anything. But on June 23^rd, 1995, I was that boy. I went into the water to boogie board for a short period of time but I mostly just sat on the beach while I wondered what was going on with my father.

 

My father was always just “dad”. I never grew old enough to call him by his first name and to be honest, I doubt I ever would have.

 

 

 

My dad was the resident tooth-puller of our extended family. It may sound bizarre but that is one of the first things that comes to mind when someone asks me about him. He was extremely intelligent, but always had a connection with children. He had over a dozen nieces and nephews before my brother and I were born so by the time we started to lose our teeth he was a certified expert. Whenever any of my cousins had a loose tooth, they would always come to see “Uncle Eddy”. Sometimes he would turn away business and tell us that the tooth wasn’t ready to come out just yet. He would always joke about tying to string around the door and the other end to your tooth. In actuality, he would tell you he was going to count to three, gently tug on the tooth and by the time he got to “two” he would be holding the tooth in front of your face.

 

Eddy Gene Walker Jr. was born on August 15, 1951 to Eddy Walker and Shirley Walker. As a kid he was the bat boy for his older brother’s baseball team which was coached by his dad. He would help carry equipment and trade baseball cards with the kids on the team. Baseball cards and the sport itself were a passion of my dad’s as evidenced by the nearly quarter-million baseball cards he collected over the course of his life. He was always a trusting person even after one of his “friends” made off with a big chuck of his card collection (that included several 1952 Topps cards that may or may not have contained a Mickey Mantle card that sold for as much as $275,000) when he was a teenager.

 

 

 

Long before the days of student identification cards and school security guards, my dad did something that could never be completed today. In his junior year at Redlands High School, he came to school on yearbook photo day but David Brooks did not. My dad went to have his photo taken then came back later with glasses on and his hair parted to the side and took a photo for David Brooks.

 

 

 

While attending Redlands High School he pitched for the varsity baseball team but he also discovered his other passion was music. The countless concerts he attended during his youth accounted for the severe hearing loss in his right ear and partial hearing loss in his left ear. When I would ride with him in his beige colored Toyota pick-up truck I’d have to speak up and he would regale me with stories of attending the Newport Pop Festival. I remember him telling me that Jimi Hendrix played the first day but was so out of his mind on drugs he played with his back to the audience the entire time. However, on the third and final night of the festival he came back played one of the most amazing sets my dad had ever seen.

 

 

 

It was my dad’s love for music that would lead him to the love of his life. At least once a week he would make a trip to the Wherehouse Records store inside the Redlands Mall. It was there that he met my mother who was working as a clerk. After exchanging several musical recommendations, including my dad suggesting my mom listen to Thijs van Leer, they eventually began to date. While they were dating, my mom was walking past a jewelry store with her sister and she pointed out a pair of earrings she liked. A short time later my dad gave her a necklace matching the earrings she had noticed. My mom called her sister to thank her for telling him, but her sister explained that she had never mentioned it. Within three months my dad proposed and they were married on June 30, 1979.

 

 

 

My parents did not have children right away, as I was born almost three years after their marriage. My dad however was busy preparing and he became a Boy Scout leader. He made 8MM recordings of horror films that he would act out with his Boy Scout troop. Probably not something that’d be in the Boy Scout handbook but something that he and the boys thoroughly enjoyed doing all the same.

 

My dad was a huge fan of Stephen King novels and it helped to explain his dark sense of humor. He loved Halloween and had a few expensive and creepy masks. During one Halloween that I was too young to remember my dad opened the door with a scary mask that made a young girl in a princess costume very scared. My dad tried to take off the mask to show the kid there was nothing to worry about but having trouble with the mask only further frightened the young trick-or-treater.

 

Halloween was probably my dad's favorite holiday but he helped make Christmas amazing each year for my brother Aaron and I. My grandpa would stop by on Christmas Eve and throw small rocks onto the roof while talking in a deep gruff voice to his reindeer. We would come out on Christmas morning to see the presents that Santa had left for us along with the presents from mom and dad. The presents from my parents were always wrapped but the presents from Santa were always left out near the tree and assembled by Santa and his elfs. 

 

As I was growing up, my dad worked for Minolta selling copy machines to help provide us with new toys each birthday and Christmas. He was great at his job because he was great with people. He won numerous sales awards and the most memorable for me was a trip to a fancy Japanese restaurant in Palm Springs along with limousine ride out there.

 

 

 

My dad was a big fan of movies and would take Aaron and I to the movies on a regular basis. I remember the first R-rated movie we were able to see was Speed. His favorite film was One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and his favorite actor was Jack Nicholson When I told him my favorite was Robert DeNiro I remember him saying something along the lines of "performances don't get much better than DeNiro in The Deer Hunter". After watching The Shawshank Redemption with my dad, I made the comment that Morgan Freeman was probably the best black actor I had seen. My dad quickly corrected me and told me that he was just a great actor and it was wrong to use skin color as a qualifier.

 

I loved taking trips to the zoo, especially the San Diego Zoo. I could spend over an hour with my dad walking around the reptile exhibit and of course marveling at the big cats. For a short period of time, our house began to model itself after a zoo with a dog, a cat, a snake, a chameleon, several other reptiles and even a tarantula.

 

 

 

Our house had a large backyard that we would use to play various sports with friends and neighbors. My friend Brooks met both criteria because he lived in a house just behind mine and we would often play together. On that day in late June, I went to the beach with Brooks and his family.

 

Less than 50 miles away at Cedar Sinai Hospital, doctors were preparing my dad for liver transplant surgery. He had been on the donor waiting list for years. It was several months after David Crosby had received his highly-publicized liver transplant and just two weeks after Mickey Mantle received his liver transplant. My dad being a lifelong fan of both music and baseball respected both men for what they did but I believe held some resentment for the fact their liver problems were self-inflicted and seemed to have someone let them past the velvet rope while others on the donor list were left to wait and stare into their beepers. When my dad was younger he worked for Comet Termite and it was his prolonged exposure to pesticides that caused the irreparable damage to his liver.

 

I don’t remember much after the transplant took place except for the overwhelming relief when I found out it was successful. My dad was sent to recover at an outpatient facility in West Hollywood, CA which just happened to coincide with their annual Gay Pride Parade. We would make the nearly two hour trip down to visit him and so did most of his family. During one evening when his brother Bob had come to visit him, they decided to take a walk around the building. They made an observation about how many same sex couples were walking around in the area when my uncle remarked “What do you think they are thinking about us?” and my dad quipped “Do you want to hold hands?” The only other memory I have from his outpatient recovery was when I was half-asleep eating raw bacon from the refrigerator when my mom walked into the kitchen and pulled the slab of bacon out of my hands.

 

After the transplant my dad was his normal jovial self. He received the liver transplant from a Hispanic man who had died in a car accident. When my dad returned home we went out to dinner at a small Mexican restaurant and my dad told us the food tasted better with his new liver. He would also joke that he thought the liver was from a black man because the blues sounded so much better to him.

 

On Nov 6, 1995, my dad was going to take my brother, my cousin Jeff and myself to the Best Buy store in San Bernardino that has recently been opened. We went to Burger King for lunch and my dad told us he wasn’t feeling well and that our trip would have to be postponed. It was later that afternoon that my dad died and it was single most crushing experience of my life.

 

 

 

That was fifteen years ago last month and while it's still painful, his memory brings more smiles than tears these days. Inspired by Roger Ebert's essay My Old Man, I first decided to write this and put the proverbial pen to paper because I know that I'll never see him again but I have these memories along with many more that will shimmer and fade as time passes by. While knowing I won't ever see him again is a harrowing thought, it brings me great joy to know how much he changed my life along with lives of all of his friends and family members for the better.

-Dedicated to my brother Aaron and my mom Ruth

Best Films of the Last Decade

If you read this blog and I post with any regularity, you'll likely find out that I'm semi-obsessed with lists. It probably has something to do with my mild, undiagnosed OCD and/or Asperger syndrome.

When I was making my list for the best films of 2009, I began to wonder where they would land in the best films of the decade.

Here is my list of the best films from 2000-2009:

50. The Aviator (2004)
49. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
48. Jarhead (2005)
47. District 9 (2009)
46. Mulholland Dr. (2001)
45. Punch Drunk Love (2002)
44. Zodiac (2007)
43. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
42. Zombieland (2009)
41. Millions (2004)
40. Collateral (2004)
39. 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
38. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
37. Avatar (2009)
36. Spartan (2004)
35. Sin City (2005)
34. Crash (2004)
33. Traffic (2000)
32. Garden State (2004)
31. Man on Fire (2004)
30. Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
29. Once (2006)
28. Michael Clayton (2007)
27. Best in Show (2000)
26. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)
25. The Lookout (2007)
24. Mystic River (2003)
23. Man on Wire (2008)
22. The Departed (2006)
21. Requiem For a Dream (2000)
20. The Diving Bell & The Butterfly (2007)
19. The Prestige (2006)
18. Memento (2000)
17. Children of Men (2006)
16. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2 (2003/2004)
15. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
14. Million Dollar Baby (2004)
13. Minority Report (2002)
12. Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
11. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
10. The Hurt Locker (2009)
9. Unbreakable (2000)
8. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
7. There Will Be Blood (2007)
6. Inglorious Basterds (2009)

5. Match Point (2005)

4. 25th Hour (2002)

3. City of God (2002)

2. No Country For Old Men (2007)

1. Adaptation. (2002)